“Sit Down!”

Yesterday evening, I had a really long conversation with a friend and we were talking about how faith + ANXIETY = Sin. 

Faith plus anxiety is when you  PRAY unto God, CAST your cares upon him, and then PICK up your cares again. Sound familiar? 

 

What we do to God, through his son Jesus when we pray with anxiety is simply telling him He is not able; that He, the I AM THAT I AM, is big, but is not big enough for that situation. Father forgive us in Jesus name. 

 

As if on cue, my devotions this morning took me to John 6 (the story of “Jesus Feeds Five Thousand). Before then, I had fed myself some Hebrews 11 on Faith. I stopped at the point where the Bible says, without Faith it is impossible to please God. I am thinking I need to go on a thorough search on Faith in the Bible and how to exercise it that the  will of God may be made manifest in my life. 

 

Back to feeding the 10, 000. In verse 5 it says,

“Jesus soon saw a HUGE crowd of people coming to look for him. Turning to Phillip he asked, “where can we buy bread to feed all these people?” (vs 6) He was testing Phillip for he already knew what he was going to do. (vs 7 ) Phillip relied, “Even if we worked for months, we wouldn’t have enough money to feed them.”

What test are you facing in your life today? Jesus already knows what he is going to do about your situation, but stepping into a faithless situation is not His forte. What Jesus asked Phillip shows that there is no problem appreciating the magnitude of your challenge, SO LONG AS you equally appreciate you have a bigger God. 

 

Did you pay attention to Jesus’ question and Phillip’s answer? Jesus’ question asked for shops around where we could buy bread for the people -he wasn’t asking for the money to buy the bread. Phillip’s faithless response was even if we worked for months and saved every penny, we can’t afford pay for the amount of bread we would need to adequately feed these people (paraphrased). 

 

Let’s ask ourselves – how many times have we given God that kind of answer to a great declaration he has made over our lives? How have we reacted to a ‘blessing in the horizon’ from God. Imagine if Abraham did not have the faith to carry the promise of God to make him a Father of nations, even when nothing else around him looked like it – where would we be today? 

 

This brings me to my lesson for today (inspired by my devotional Girlfriends in God). The lesson is extracted from Verse 10 – it contains what Jesus wants us to do when we are faced with situations that are bigger than us (which happen almost all the time). It goes thus:

“Tell everyone to sit down,” Jesus said 

 This is how my devotional puts it, 

“He didn’t feed the ones who were running around worrying – but the ones who were at rest.”

 Let’s reflect on our situations and challenges in relation to our Faith-O-Metre, and do the right thing by God, SIT DOWN and stop worrying, because He is asking for your genuine answer to this question, “IS my arm too short to save you?” 

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